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Home , Western philosophy

PLATO (427-347) and his influence on Western

Mario Neva

Djimé Grand Philosophat November 2012 It is difficult to establish the extent of ’s influence on human culture, so profound, original and wide is the legacy he has left through his works. Plato left us 36 dialogues and 13 letters, which after his death were handed down through the centuries, preserving their appeal and stimulating ever new translators and interpreters. Each new translation of Plato’s collected works has brought or signposted a renewal of philosophy and also in part of . Plato’s translations are therefore a very relevant issue in , an issue running in parallel with the question of the translation of the

Bible. There are justified doubts regarding the complete authenticity of the 13 letters, but Plato’s thought rises like the sun’s light from these writings. This is certainly not the place for such a discussion. Suffice it to say that there are no reasonable doubts regarding the authenticity of the most important texts, their individual and collective coherence, and above all regarding the genius of their author. Plato’s biography and his thought were well known during his life and immediately after his death, due to the illustrious status of his

Academy, dedicated to Athens, the divine protector of the

Polis. The Academy started its activity after Plato’s first journey to Syracuse, in 487, when he, a man of forty, was already rich in and rich in contacts with living all around the Mediterranean area (Megara, Egypt, ). We stress this aspect to counter the widespread misapprehension that abstraction, and consequently theory, are far from life. On the contrary, theories and abstractions in

Philosophy are the splendid and vigorous daughters of much . This is true for Plato’s thought above all; it is from this realistic and ‘holistic’ approach to real life that Plato’s famous doctrine of the Hyperuranium, the of ideas and

of the metaphysic Kingdom, takes

its original form. Plato’s Academy

continued for almost 1000 years

until Justinian closed it in 529 AC.

The Academy was thought of as a school where

Philosophy becomes a methodical rigorous path to follow, an all-embracing concept of education like PAIDEIA, at once intellectual and moral, also inclusive of religious observance.

This public institution marked the of Philosophy itself.

Aristotle’s Gymnasium, the Stoics’ Portico and ’

Garden, but also later Jewish and Christian Theological schools, like Alexandria, take important inspiration from

Plato’s Academy. The Academy started the process whereby

Philosophy became a Greek social and a public institution, not only the dream of solitary thinkers. Another compels us to dwell a little longer on this topic. It would have been impossible for Plato’s thought to achieve such widespread diffusion and influence without a living school, a learning environment for students like

Aristotle. The continuous production of philosophical work requires active readers with whom a can discuss ideas, convers In Plato’s Academy Philosophy is a synonymous of . The Tübingen School led by Jaeger emphasized a statement contained in the VII letter, in which Plato, as in

Phaedrus, describes philosophy as a spoken and living thing, only prepared by and channeled through the written word.

This is another facet of Plato’s irony: through ’ mouth he pushes the limits everywhere, and in this case, while the dialogue insists on the superiority of live speech, the written text reaches a superior literary style. Entering Plato’s

Philosophy is always a great adventure, a joyful, playful adventure.

At this point we must address the extraordinary links between Plato and Socrates, and between Plato and Aristotle.

In considering the originality of each, their relationships, their intellectual and moral genius, it is very difficult to put things down to coincidence. Catholic thinkers correctly ascribe this to a providential plan, thus adding another point of , the theological one, to the philosophical journey. We believe however that this providential interpretation is acceptable only if we extend it to the whole of the world’s , rather than just to one particular moment. In Plato’s earlier writings, like the Apology, Socrates appears as the symbol of

Philosophy, contrasted against the , as we have already said, and Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s doctrine of ideas reveals more semi-hidden similarities than superficial oppositions …

Confronted with such a great personality we must caliber our approach to him and make sure we think of Plato as a man rather than a myth.

First we must consider his own PAIDEIA. He came from a rich family. His education was characteristic of the upper classes.

During his youth he was considered a poet, able to write and to speak. This means without any doubt that he was strongly associated with established education, and oriented towards public and political affairs. After the first stages of his education, he preserved the ability to study, and keep his open to worldwide culture (we must remember that at that philosophy embraced all cultural interests). Mathematics, music and nature observation also find their place in this quadrant. We must also say that Plato’s capacity for assimilation was extraordinary… , ,

Cratylus, , , Euclid, , ,

Egyptian beliefs, poems, especially Homer’s and Hesiod’s works, all is assimilated in a superior synthesis. In his dialogues we find the first organized history of Greek

Philosophy. We can certainly consider his approach to the early history of Western thought a subjective one, but geniuses’ subjectivity always has teachings to offer.

In particular, Plato pointed to Parmenides and Heraclitus as the fathers of Philosophy and to Socrates as the moral paragon of living Philosophy. All attempts to overcome this hermeneutic canon have failed.

Coming from an excellent and aristocratic education, Plato then actively participates to the political and cultural life of

Athens, in the historical phase of its decadence following the

Peloponnesian war, which started in 426 and ended miserably in 404 (Plato was born in 428). His family was actively and tragically involved in the period of the Thirty tyrants, therefore all his political analyses, especially the POLITEIA, are not the dreamy idylls of an utopic visionary, but snapshots anchored in reality, and perhaps ironic denunciation: in his the rule or reason has become impossible. On this subject, as we have already said, it seems to us that K. Popper speaks like a blind man. What is absolutely not modern in Plato’s thought is its radical orientation towards a rigorously moral behavior.

Plato was twenty years old in 399 when he witnessed

Socrates’ trial and death sentence. Biographies state that having listened to Socrates’ lessons young Plato abandoned poetry and his artistic and political aspirations. Socrates’ death deeply affected Plato’s life and thought. and , morals and Philosophy, good life and good thinking, happiness and reason are the facets of the same reality. This awareness runs through the whole of Plato’s production like a golden thread, and reaches its apex in the definition of justice as belonging to the divine dimension, as the most attractive idea.

But, in order to be seduced by justice, man needs to undergo a process of purification, and to mature the ability to overcome his human attachment to opinions (). In this wider sense, all Plato’s philosophy, his whole theory of acknowledge can be described as the journey from DOXA-opinion to ALETHEIA- truth-. It is also a journey from physical to metaphysical inquiry. The image devised by Plato is felicitous; he says that at first follow a natural and easy way, or a ‘first navigation’, while they observe the things; but in so doing they cannot see the meaning of what they observe, so that a second navigation, the one, becomes necessary: that is Philosophy as a journey, but also Philosophy as definitive goal.

When Heidegger criticizes Plato’s doctrine of truth, he reveals his inability to understand this Socratic overcoming of death; he sees Plato involved in the stupid business of building metaphysic like a LEGO, the ONTOTEOLOGY. So did Plato create or discover it? That is the question, one as important, we think, as Shakespeare’s to be or not to be. But we know that Heidegger was a simple teacher, limited by his culture.

The very heart of Plato’s Philosophy is the journey from opinions to truth; it was people’s opinion which brought

Socrates to death. The speculative centre of this journey is a perfect of the interior life. Plainly put, that centre is a constant reflection on ourselves, a true and constant full self-consciousness of our spiritual .

That is not a cultural or historical question, it is at the very heart of speculative life. In short Plato maintains that it is not enough to learn philosophy, the question is to think: that is the reason way he proclaims ‘if a man is Dialectic, he is Dialectic, but if a man is not Dialectic, he is not at all’…Dialectic here is synonymous with Philosopher. Evidently we are confronted by an aristocratic vision of philosophy. Starting from his self- consciousness Plato becomes a spectator of universal and concrete , and through this insight he can access a superior acknowledge, as in Heraclitus’ sentence about the unlimited perspective of and the SOUL.

‘You not find out the limits of the soul when you go, travelling on every road, so deep a logos’ it possesses.

This passage was sadly denied by Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, so far they lived from the philosophical meadows, but to this day it rules all metaphysical …the true aim of metaphysics is therefore not to create new but to discover that reality without intelligible, ideal and divine world, is not , it is absurd. It is evident the demands of absolute logic coherence in observing the world’s mechanisms was from the beginning a strong philosophical foundation which drove to the highest conception of and LOGOS.

We would like to say that a strong philosophical vision always precedes the ability to demonstrate it. This is the case, perhaps, in Plato’s doctrine too. Contemporary thinkers would find themselves in a vicious circle: they try to demonstrate what in the classic Platonic way is simply assumed. A demonstration is a dialectic performance whereby a claim reinforces itself by overcoming doubts and objections, but it is not the way usually and normally followed by natural intelligence. Plato’s geniality can be experienced by observing his extraordinary ability to transform theoretic

Philosophy in living dialogue where different opinions come from different characters. In this way, all the most important philosophical themes find their place in Plato’s inquiry.

Starting from the theory of where Plato outlines the notion of the innate ideas corresponding to ontological ideas… and passing through all dimensions of human existence, education, teaching, politics, war, poetry, rhetoric, love-EROS … his main tendency is to discover the exact equivalence between truth, justice and happiness, in a theological natural dimension. Plato deeply marks all the following philosophical inquiries with his rigorous effort to clean the mind of figments of the imagination and religious myths, while at the same time introducing philosophical myths. That is the means and the literary tool that human thought utilizes when it recognizes its limits but also its possibilities.

Aristotle’s criticism of Plato is easy and well-known. With his world of ideas, he says, Plato denied reality, and its ontological . Aristotle seeks in the physical world what Plato attributes to ideas as principles… Aristotle interprets Plato’s position as deriving from the influence of Cratylus and Heraclitus, the masters of transformation and change, and consequently he maintains that Plato radically denies the very possibility of achieving a science of nature. When Descartes and Kant, in different ways, wrote about the same theme, they were not wholly aware of those anticipations. They seem to be slightly late in grasping the relationship between concepts and the anticipations in Plato and Aristotle … the destiny of philosophers sometime is cruel! The pages at the beginning of

Aristotle’s Metaphysics explain this interpretation but we can understand it only if we think about and accept Aristotle’s doctrine of the , particularly of the formal and material causes. While in Plato forms are separate from things and things participate of or imitate them, in Aristotle forms are things in themself. In our opinion both Aristotle and

Plato experience the limits that human intelligence encounters in ruling material reality. Saint considers those limits to be a source of angst for great geniuses, angustia praeclara ingenia, because those philosophers were deprived of the biblical idea of creation, and the supreme revelation of the living in Jesus Christ; Biblical revelation and the in Jesus Christ will overcome those Greek limits, but it may be that we can overcome them only with grace, with reason enlightened by divine faith. In any case, reflecting on Aristotle’s advancements on Plato, it is easier to criticize Plato then to sweep him off: we can observe that, even if Aristotle’s critique is a radical one, Plato still rules Philosophy. In this fundamental matter it is necessary to distinguish correctly between Plato and

Platonism, and between and Neo-Platonism, another typical issue of Western Philosophy. Naturally, like

Socrates and Plato, Aristotle needs to be studied directly. It is odd is that many philosophical movements, abundantly present in the XX century and now, born of the highest

expressions of the thought of

Socrates-Plato and Aristotle, are not

mentioned with the names of their

generators, unlike ,

Epicureanism, and so on…

Finally, we must remember that among the 13 letters attributable to Plato, only VII is considered authentic (with the possible addition of part of VIII). The content of this letter is very interesting and crucial to our understanding of the life of

Plato as a Philosopher and as a politician… he travelled to

Syracuse there , three times he failed, the first time with

Dionysus I, second time with the son Dionysus II and lastly with Dion the uncle of the new king. In this letter we find also precious information about Plato’s Philosophy. Above all we must underline the five-stage path, beginning with 1-name, 2- definition, 3-image, 4-dialectic, 5-idea contemplation… all this movement is an interior path leading to the fact that the soul’s self-consciousness is the only essence in human culture to be expressed definitively, with an extraordinarily continuous effect. Perfect and adequate self-consciousness and consequently a consciousness of ourselves as living bodies are the pillars for the understanding of Plato, all the rest follows from there. We are somewhat sorry for Kant and his followers.

Plato is for soldiers and boxers … poets and musicians, mathematicians and writers … his vision extends to the living and visible world, and at the same time to the deepest inner space of metaphysics… he was the amazing disciple of the man that the oracle proclaimed to be the wisest, and teacher of the thinkers known worldwide as the Philosopher. We do not believe in him because only one God in Jesus Christ is worthy of receiving the total assent of our faith, but we have read his dialogues, starting simply to think freely … believing is God’s property and permission, God’s gift. With Plato, then, we have two wings.